CALF_News_December_2018_January_2019

25 CALF News • December 2018 | January 2019 • www.calfnews.net We buy DNA verified calves. It all began when a French cattleman bought a farm in Georgia... ® For more information visit: FPLFOOD.COM FPL Food is the Southeast’s one-of-a-kind source for sustainable beef. Privately owned and operated, this producer and processor pairs French provincial farming traditions with a dedication to providing quality beef. Expanding our Akaushi Beef Program We buy DNA verified calves Call us today! 706.922.5528 Raised without any growth implants, ionophores or promotants Weaned and backgrounded for at least 45 days. We buy feeder calves as well as finished fed cattle “If an outbreak happens, we can look back and iden- tify the common points long before testing ever happened,”Dorn said. There was an outbreak of E. coli in romaine let- tuce from Arizona that took almost four months to identify the cause of, but with the data they were collecting, it was eventually narrowed down and identified.“On a high level, that is what we are trying to do [identify causes]. On a practical or field level, these are tough changes,” Dorn said.“It’s not easy to get field workers to utilize handheld devices to register the harvest.” However, Dorn pointed out that point-of-harvest data collection raises the accountability of the people harvesting the crops, treating them like the professionals they are. Rather than feeling like they are being watched, it helps them realize that how they do what they do matters. Stephen Laughlin with IMB Corpo- ration said that their use of blockchain technology and how it was developed and modified for use in food produc- tion was a bit like a hammer looking for a nail. They had the technology and were looking for business problems in consumer products, agriculture, retailers, etc., that needed their solution. “Blockchain technology works because you have shared and trusted data. Mul- tiple parties must validate and verify the blocks of data along the way,” Laughlin said.“It’s simply a shared database and, once verified, you don’t argue about your data versus my data.” WithWalmart as one of their largest clients, IMB proposed a concept to capture data at the field level and store it in a single data store – the blockchain – so that when there was an incident or an outbreak, they could quickly identify the farm, the lot and the day it originated. It was a concept that resonated withWalmart and presented huge applications. Kroger, Driscoll’s, McCormick and others are looking at implementing this technology. Laughlin used the example of the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach that took months to identify, resulting in a huge health crisis and a decimated spinach industry. It took spinach six years to recover and get back to the pre- outbreak sales volumes. While Laughlin was careful not to downplay the health issue and loss of life, he did highlight Continued on page 26  Ajay Menon (left), dean of the CSU College of Agricultural Sciences, speaks with Tom Vilsack (right), CEO and president of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, CSU strategic adviser, and former Iowa governor and secretary of agriculture during a break at the Ag Innovation Summit.